Evaluating the influence of social media exposure of scholarly articles: Perspectives of social media engagement and click metrics

Abstract

In this preliminary study, we investigate the influence of scholarly content sharing on two different social media platforms on paper clicks. Based on the clicks data of short links embedded in the social media posts, we quantify the performance from a novel perspective that has been underexplored by previous altmetrics studies. We select 162 papers published in Cell from October 2016 to May 2018 and investigate the scholarly content posted on Twitter and Facebook by the journal. We collect social media acts data depending on the affordances of these platforms, including retweets, likes, reactions, and shares; moreover, we collect the short links in the posts and the link metrics data. Our results show that in absolute terms, scholarly Facebook posts sharing scholarly content have higher clicks than similar tweets. The number of Facebook reactions and shares are four and 2.5 times of Twitter likes and retweets, respectively. Moreover, the click metrics of short links show that posts on Facebook have directed twice as much readers to the papers as posts on Twitter. However, the true exposure effect of the two platforms is similar when the difference of total followers between the two platforms are eliminated. The regression analysis suggests that social media engagement has positive effects on directing users to the papers. Whether reactions and shares on Facebook or likes and retweets on Twitter would affect the clicks of the short links.